City.Net IES: An Integrated Energy Infrastructure Decision Support System

Abstract

Estimating and visualizing the sustainability-related impacts of critical infrastructure are imperative in planning and developing a sustainable city. Comprehensive energybased Decision Support Systems (DSSs) exist but most DSSs do not incorporate spatial data and interdependencies of the energy system with other critical systems such as water, waste, transportation and building. This thesis presents City.Net's Integrated Energy System (IES), a model-driven energy DSS with a focus on sustainability, and evaluates the IES using Masdar City as a case study. City.Net is a model-driven DSS that models a city's energy, water, waste, building and transportation systems while taking the interdependencies between the systems into account. The IES models energy generation, transmission, distribution and consumption at the city level. This thesis also presents the application of a comprehensive systems engineering approach in the development an energy system model. The inclusion of hierarchical decomposition and interdependencies in this approach ensures that the system can be viewed in three important dimensions, rather than the conventional one-dimensional system perspective, and the system decomposition method guarantees that the energy model can be seamlessly scaled with new technologies and parameters. Furthermore, the use of spatial data expands the domain of utilization of energy DSSs in planning energy systems. One of this utilizations is in the Geographic Information System (GIS) domain since the modeling approach used in City.Net incorporates nodes, edges, and layers, which are GIS framework concepts. A case study highlighting the advantages of the IES is also presented and discussed.

Date of Award	2012
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Davor Svetinovic (Supervisor)